Ubiquitous computing, digital failure and citizenship learning in Swedish popular education

How do adult students enact citizenship, and what discursive and material conditions make certain enactments more or less possible? This article draws on 37 interviews with adult students at Swedish Folk High Schools and focuses on the everyday material-discursive enactments of interactive media in adult students’ statements about citizenship. Drawing on a post-constructional perspective, the analysis illustrates how students’ statements about citizenship are made possible by ever-present media technologies and the associated practices of ‘living in media’. Students’ statements continuously reiterate how notions of citizenship are entangled with the Internet (and other new media). However, while new media are deeply embedded in the everyday lives of citizens and enables important citizenship enactments, they are also a source of discomfort, giving rise to ambiguous statements. These double-edged statements refer on the one hand to negative implications on physical health, distraction from important tasks and an over-reliance on the Internet as an everyday need, and on the other hand to improved access to information, convivial communities and empowered citizenship.